> I'm interested in possibly updating my fork and maintaining it as
> exactly what the original lua/lua repo was (a buildable mirror of official
> releases), but I don't know what this "repogen" is. I've Googled the name
> every way I can think of, and I can only get results about some
> Ubuntu/Debian feature that doesn't seem relevant.
I'm curious what the use of such a repository is.
If you just need a mirror of lua releases, I could attach the release
tarballs to the github "releases"?
As I see it, having such a repository gives people another option to obtain the source code other than downloading the tarball from
lua.org. The current lua/lua repo doesn't really work for that, unless one wants to spend time manually moving things around to get them in the right spots for "make" to work correctly.
Additionally, if someone wishes to fork Lua and make their own modifications to it and publish those modifications, it can be easier to simply fork a Git repo, commit their changes to it, and push those changes. This has the benefit of enabling easy application of upstream bugfixes and other releases, by simply fetching the changes and merging them.
I'm also now beginning to consider tweaking the repo to include some "extras" such as Windows Visual Studio build files, as well as copies of many of the power patches available on the wiki (as patch files ready to apply, not actually modifying the source myself). Basically, I see it as an "third-party mirror with enhanced features". It provides an extra place and method to obtain the releases, giving people more options, and provides some additional stuff that people might find useful, but which is unobtrusive and which the Lua team doesn't provide (for good reason). The source code in the repo will be identical to the tarballs, just with the extras added.
Actually, the more I think about this, the more I'm thinking it might be better to just start a fresh repo with just the latest releases (5.1/5.2/5.3) rather than going this route, especially if I'm going to start adding all of these extras.